Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve...holidays take on an entirely different meaning in a narcissistic family system. Trauma expert Shannon Thomas said it best "In healthy families, you're just yourself – your name, your talents, your strengths, and weaknesses. You're the person. But in a narcissistic family, things are different. Everybody has to find somewhere to be and a job to do within the family… they either support the narcissistic parent, or they are the focus of the narcissistic parent's rage." 

Tony discusses the dynamics of the narcissistic family giving particular attention to the scapegoat. Tony extensively references Alexander Burgemeester's article "Toxic Narcissistic Family Dynamics Explained" from his excellent website https://thenarcissisticlife.com/narcissistic-family-dynamics/, and he provides a beautiful description of the true power of the scapegoat from the website https://anchoredabode.com/2019/09/03/scapegoat-definition-narcissism/ 

And you can find out more about Tony's new parenting course in the Relationship Mastery Pack https://www.epicmarriageclub.com/a/2147499720/h3Cn8yaE Get thousands of dollars in relationship tools for one special Black Friday price featuring Tony's brand new parenting course: 3 Keys to Positive Parenting - Bring the Positivity without Messing Up Your Kids Even if You're Not Sure Where to Start! Go to https://www.epicmarriageclub.com/a/2147499720/h3Cn8yaE to sign up for thousands of dollars worth of relationship tools for less than the cost of one therapy session.

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[00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Quick note before we get started today, if you listen to last week's episode on waking up the narcissism, you heard that it was a surprise bonus episode from the virtual couch. That was because I had some audio difficulties. Well, those audio difficulties continued to a point, so I just wanted to give you a little heads up that this one may not exactly flow as best as I would like. But boy, we cover a lot of ground, a lot of information today. And I also realize there might be a couple of the audio files that are holdovers from last week from my previous attempts at recording. So you might even hear that the sound quality might differ just a tiny bit. We're going to try to take care of that in post-production. But you know what? Enjoy the ride on today's episode because again, a lot of ground, this one's a little bit longer, but we cover a lot of topics that they may not even be in order. And that might just be a fun little puzzle that you can put together over your Thanksgiving break.

[00:00:48] So let's get to the show.

[00:00:55] Hey, everybody, welcome to episode 11, waking up the narcissism, I'm your host, Tony Overbay in the licensed marriage and family therapist and host of the Virtual Couch podcast. And I want to jump right in. I want to thank you for your concern, your kindness, because in the beginning of last week's episode, apparently you could feel that the air had been let out of my balloon. I had this incident with a file that I had recorded, and now it will simply go down as the lost files. It was about 30 minutes of material about the narcissistic family system and the company that I use to record the podcast. I was going back and forth with tech support, and I'm following up because I again kind people asking How is how am I doing with this lost file? And it was this really fascinating. I almost felt like I was being gaslit by a large company, and that's fine. I know that they didn't mean to. I know that they had absolutely good intentions, but this file, I kept downloading the file that showed a large file size. I would plug it into anything I could that would produce sound and there was no sound. So at one point they came back and said, We've had some glitches, we've had some problems. We'd like to offer you a free month of our services and you have a backup of this file in this sup...